


if you ever wanna be in love

by dancingthru



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F, Multiverse, basically just the janet episode of the good place, just a lot of confusion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-03
Updated: 2019-08-06
Packaged: 2020-07-29 21:30:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 16,846
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20089078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dancingthru/pseuds/dancingthru
Summary: “Isn’t there one single version of me out there, in some universe, that isn’t in love with her?”ORLena accidentally makes a device that brings her doppelgangers to Earth-38. It doesn't work out well. (Actually, it does.)





	1. Chapter 1

The bag full of burgers settles onto Kara's desk with a plop, and she looks up with eyes that are a little too wide.

"I figured you hadn't eaten." Lena leans against the desk with a smirk. "Thought I'd fix that."

"That's _my_ thing." Kara is actually, wholly, 100 percent shocked. It's her move to bring Lena food or coffee, to drop by without warning with a reminder to be human. Not the other way around. Especially not lately. 

"Well, not always." Lena's hand brushes Kara's shoulder, and she beams up into it. "I like to make sure you're okay."

She presses a kiss into the top of Kara's head, and she flushes almost immediately at the way she preens under the feeling, the smell of Lena so close to her, the pressure of her lips fleeting but familiar.

"I'll let you get back to it." She's gone with another smile tossed over her shoulder, and Kara can't wipe the grin off her face.

In the end, she should've known something was horribly wrong.

Things hadn't been normal in a year. Not since the truth broke everything between them. They've been talking for six months, edging towards normalcy over the past two. But it's all been fragmented — a wine night that feels almost intimate followed by a week of radio silence, a few lunches together in a row followed by an icy coldness when she brings Lena a salad one day.

But they've been working on it, both of them, and that's been the important thing. They've been working, both of them believing that one day, someday, this would be okay.

So yes, Kara should've known something was wrong, but she was too busy basking in the warmth of it all to pick up on the inherent _off_ness of the day. And even when she comes home, and Lena is there, leaned against her door with a hand running through her hair, she's just too damn _happy_ to really care about right or wrong. 

She lets out a little cough, and Lena looks up, her face filling with a smile so bright that it almost sends Kara staggering.

"Hey you." She pushes away from the wall, walking towards Kara with that same joy filling her face, and she slows to a stop. "My key wasn't working but I knew you got off soon so I figured I'd just wait and-"

And now Lena is sidling up to her, and now she isn't stopping until they're toe to toe, hips brushing, and now her hands are fisting in the folds of her coat, and she's not wearing heels so now she's rocking up on her toes to get close enough and-

And they're kissing. Or, Lena is kissing Kara while she stands stock still, eyes wide open, frozen in something like shock.

"You want to let me in so I can get you out of this?"

Lena tugs the coat, and it tugs Kara down to earth. Her thoughts are racing too fast to catch, too fast even for Kara, and for a brief moment she's so overwhelmed that she just screws her eyes shut, seeking the calm of the black behind her eyelids.

Then there's a whistle, a high pitch that jerks Kara's head around the second she hears it. The whistle stops, and there's a gap of silence to seek out the sound, to trace it back, and then—

"_Kara_."

Her head snaps back to Lena, the Lena in front of her, the Lena still holding onto the front of her coat, her lipstick still smudged on her mouth. She hesitates for a second, but then she hears Lena's voice again, insistent, urgent in her ear, and then she's out of the apartment, in the air before she can falter again, following the source of the cry.

She lands a little too hard in a clearing just outside the city, dropping through thick foliage and landing with a solid _whump_ that stirs up a cloud of moss and fallen leaves.

In the middle of the forest, Lena sticks out like a sore thumb in a long black coat and her designer boots. She whirls around, lets out a relieved gasp when she sees Kara, although her eyes are already narrowing when she sees the look of sheer confusion coloring her eyes.

"Kara, thank God."

"Lena." She takes a wary step forward. "What's wrong? Why are you out here?"

"What's wrong?" Lena's eyes flash open, her face a look of almost parodied shock. "Um, Kara, look around?"

She waves her arms, and Kara's eyes slowly pan around the clearing.

"What am I looking at?"

"Our _house_." Lena's voice is sharp. If she didn't know her so well, she would think it was anger, but Kara has memorized every idiosyncrasy of Lena's voice and she knows fear when she hears it. "Kara, our house is gone, our house— where is our _house_?"

In that moment, there's a few words that Kara could fixate on. She picks the wrong one.

"_Our_ house?"

The look that falls over Lena's face is enough to make Kara thank Rao that she doesn't have any superpowers.

"What the hell is going on?"

By the time she lands on Lena's balcony, Kara is so overwrought that she cracks the tile beneath her feet. She hears Lena — or at least the Lena inside — let out a little huff of annoyance at the noise, but she can't bring herself to feel guilty.

"Kara?"

"Lena, get out here, please." 

Kara winces at the force of her voice, but she relaxes when Lena appears in the doorway to the balcony, in that green dress that makes her eyes almost glow. Because she knows. She sees her, and she knows almost intrinsically, undeniably that _this_ is the right Lena. Her Lena.

For a moment, Lena's eyes light up, soft and timid but tender. Then she sees the two versions of herself flanking Kara on either side, and she stumbles.

"Hi." Kara smiles meekly. "We have a problem."

When Lena explains it all, it's actually rather funny.

Barry heard about the fight, somehow. The one when Lena told Kara to never speak to her again, the one where she called her a traitor. The one that tore open a gap between them for months, almost a year. And of course, being Barry, he felt bad for Lena, who he'd never even met. So he brought her a gift to make her feel better. Or more like a person.

When Lena walked into her office to find Felicity at her desk, she almost pulled a gun and killed her on sight. Out of shock, more than anything. Which only got worse when she turned her head to see a man in a full-red speed suit standing there with a huge dopey grin on his face.

In the end, Felicity is exactly the distraction that Lena needs. She helps her move along several projects, spends days working in the lab over deliveries of Chinese food and unfinished prototypes. After a week, Lena isn't feeling okay, but she's feeling a step closer to herself. She lets Felicity hug her when Barry returns to take her home, leans into the warmth of it for a moment. It's the first time anyone held her since Kara, and it plucks at a tenderness in her chest that she'd been shoving down for weeks.

And that's when Felicity makes the mistake of telling her about the other techies — Nerd Corp, she calls them — back on Earth-1, and their group chat for brainstorming and general science chatter. And that, of course, is when Lena first begins to research a transponder that could send two-way messages between universes. Which, of course, is how she ended up in this mess.

"Let me get this straight." The tone of Alex's voice makes Kara eyes immediately flash to the proximity between her hand and her sidearm. "You created a breach in the multiverse so that you could be part of a _groupchat_?"

Lena swallows hard. Hard enough that it doesn't take superhearing to catch.

"...yes?"

"Jesus Christ." 

The only sound left in the lab is the thudding of Alex's boots as she stalks out the door. Kara turns slowly, trying not to smile at the sheer panic on Lena's face.

"So what went wrong?"

Lena carefully explains that the basis of the tech revolved around the idea of tugging specific, DNA-encoded messages from other universes to avoid receiving millions of interfering texts. Her plan had been to give a device to Felicity, to start, and to use their corresponding DNA to send and receive messages between earths.

And somehow, she messed it up.

"So now it's just tugging random versions of you out of other earths?"

"Basically." Lena grimaces. "I wish I could say this wasn't the biggest glitch I've ever created, but this really might take the cake."

"Hey." Kara reaches out, smoothing her thumb over Lena's forearm, watching the muscles there automatically soften. "It's going to be okay. We'll fix this."

In the end, it takes three days for Lena to construct her own interdimensional extrapolator. In that time, the two doppelgangers stay with Lena as she works so that she can run tests. Kara brings back four more in that same time. By the final trip to the lab, her brow is furrowed so tightly that Lena just wants to rub out the little crinkle, press a kiss into the skin until it relaxes. She shoves down the last thought as furtively as she can.

"The same?"

Kara nods, her fists tightening.

"This one is very upset about the _soccer practice_ that she needs to pick _our kids_ up from."

"Alright, that's enough." Lena nods at Kara, who turns immediately, cape flipping a little too violently. "I'll get her back."

Kara is gone, flown out the window, by the time Lena looks back.

Eventually, all of the copies wear Lena down. She might seem to be annoyingly, disarmingly enamored with Kara in all five of these universes, but her copies are also all just as brilliant as the original. As deeply disturbing as it feels to watch herself studying her own notes, while another version of herself peers over her shoulder, it's better than working alone.

And, eventually, three days is too long to withstand the curiosity gnawing her clean from the inside out.

“How is it?”

The words bark a little too harshly in the quiet of the lab, but Lena’s curiosity is sharp.

“How is what?”

She’s met with an arching eyebrow, and really this is all a little _too_ freaky for her taste, groundbreaking science or no.

“You know.”

“Ah-“

“Just, like you know- how does that work, like- is it good?”

There’s a curling smirk now. Lena hates it.

“Do you want me to make the ‘super’ joke?”

She chokes on that one.

“Jesus, no, I’m just wondering if-“

“It’s the best you’ll ever have.” The lab falls quiet again. "Guaranteed.”

In the end, she sends them back. That's the easy part. The hard part is figuring out how to stop the breaches personally. That part, Lena explains, could take days. Even weeks. In the meantime, Kara patrols for new breaches, collecting the Not Lenas and bringing them back to the lab to be sent back to their own worlds.

And they come. Most are in a panic, need to be talked down, especially when they see the actual Lena. Some come quietly, though, as if they haven't noticed the difference at all.

One slips into CatCo and runs her hands across Kara's back, digs her thumbs into the knots hidden just inside her shoulder blades, and she's too tired, too worn out, so she leans into it for a moment, indulges. Then she tugs at Lena's hands, looking up with eyes full of apologies, and doesn't even explain before she whisks her off to Lena's lab.

“Isn’t there one single version of me out there, in some universe, that isn’t in love with her?” She's been stretched too thin one day, between Supergirl duty and Not Lena duty, and she just blurts it out, runs her hands through her hair, eyes bulging slightly in Alex’s direction. “I mean, _seriously_?”

She had stormed into the DEO that morning basically vibrating with fury. Now, she stands in front of the comms board, her hands denting the metal under them.

Alex looks like she doesn’t know if she should smile or not, her mouth gulping through a few breaths like a goldfish. She studies her sister carefully.

“I mean, you know, there’s always this universe.”

Kara slams her eyes shut. Yeah, that was definitely the wrong thing to say. Alex takes the easy way out and ducks through the doorway before she has to deal with another lap of Kara’s pacing.

She begins to steal moments, minutes, with every version of Not Lena that comes to find her. The guilt tugs at something in her stomach whenever she returns them to Lena, seeing the weary look in her eyes as she guides her doppelganger to the table where her breach portal lies.

The questions start small, but they grow more insistent as the days stretch into weeks. The answers are terrifying, overwhelming, an amalgamation of everything she's never dared to let herself imagine.

"She calls me Lee. She started saying it on accident, and when I pointed it out the first time, she came as close to blushing as possible for a Kryptonian."

"I kissed her on accident the first time. It was supposed to be a hug and it just happened, out of the blue. She was so surprised she put her foot through the floor."

"Two boys, one girl."

"Alex was best man. Sam was maid of honor. Nia did a crazy amount of the wedding planning, believe it or not."

"You made me come over and watch all of your favorite Gene Kelly movies, and you wouldn't let me bring any work to distract me. I fell asleep after my first glass of wine, and when I woke up, you were just staring at me, like you couldn't look away, even when I looked back at you, and you wouldn't say anything so I just kissed you to make you _do_ something. Or, I kissed her. You know." 

"She told me she loved me the first day she met me. On accident, of course, just tripped over her words. But she meant it. She told me that later. She always meant it."

Kara steals every word, hides them away somewhere deep in her chest to think over later, to obsess over, folding them back and forth as if they're real and heavy in her hands. She thinks of them so often that she wonders which version of Lena she's even thinking of any more, the Lena she loves or the Not Lena that every other version of her loves, or some combination of the two.

She thinks of them so much that she realizes she hasn't visited her Lena in days, besides the brief passings of dropping off the latest Not Lena and watching them talk quietly with a clenched jaw. She never stays long enough to see the breach, never stays to see her leave. She wonders if it would hurt. She wonders if she would be able to let any version of Lena who actually loved her to leave.

And then it's been a week and she hasn't spoken a word to Lena and the guilt sinks heavy where it used to be soft. She buys Big Belly Burger in some attempt to make it better, brings a milkshake to sweeten the deal.

Standing on the threshold of Lena's lab, she feels shy, embarrassed. For a moment, she lets herself drink in the sight of Lena — she's distracted, turned partially away from the door, her eyes fixed on something just beyond the windowpane, her hands clinging to one another, fingers idly twisting the ring on her pointer finger. Her hair is pulled up, the curve of her neck soft, and Kara just wants to reach out and press her hands to her skin, feel her warmth under her fingers.

"Hi."

The noise cuts through the lab and Lena starts, shaking her head slightly, even though she doesn't turn towards Kara.

"Bring another me?"

"Better."

Lena turns, and her smile when she sees the bags of takeout isn't quite full. Kara wonders if she might not be the only one feeling timid. They eat in silence for a few moments, but it's a warm quiet, full.

"I've missed you." Lena ducks her head, and Kara smiles at her. "All of these doppelgangers are nice but, you know, they're not the same as the real deal."

"Yeah." She notices a twitch in Lena's hand, as if she's holding herself back from reaching out. "Missed you too, Kara."

"We're doing a game night," Kara blurts out. It's not true, there's no plans, but she's suddenly terrified to ask Lena to do anything on her own. "On Wednesday. You should come, you know- one night isn't going to make a difference, right?"

"That depends." Kara's heart lurches. "Are you going to pretend to be drunk, or are you bringing that Daxam liquor?"

Lena watches her with guarded eyes, a small smile playing at the left corner of her mouth.

(Kara wishes she could kiss it away.)

"Of course. I'll bring the hard stuff."

"Good." Her hands twist at that ring again, but the smile stretches a little further. "I'll be there."

Lena comes, and she's ten minutes early, and she brings three bottles of wine, one of which she immediately hands to Kara to lace with her alien liquor. Alex is there, too, which makes it easier, but Kara still feels like she's ready to jump out of her skin until she's swallowed down the first glass of red liquid.

But eventually, it eases into something closer to before — not just before the Not Lenas, but _before_ it all. It comes when Brainy and Lena dig so deep into a conversation about the technical capacity of a new experimental drug they had been working on, both of them exchanging words with too many syllables for anyone else to follow. It comes when Nia teases Lena and squeezes her hand at the same time, when she leans into the embrace. It comes when Kara looks up across her cards and sees Lena looking at her with a look so hopeful it could make her heart burst. 

It feels like a full-fledged version of happiness, and Kara wants to hold it in her chest forever.

Then there's a knock at the door. It sends a small crack through the thrill of it all.

That crack gapes wide open, shatters the moment completely, when Kara opens the door and stares back into Lena's eyes.

It's another Not Lena, and this one almost collapses the moment she sees her face.

"_Kara._"

The word is a sob, and already Not Lena's eyes are welling up with tears, her hands reaching to grab at Kara's arms, tugging her close. 

"Lee." Kara presses her away, holds her at arms length. "I'm not who you think—"

"I know." She murmurs it fervently, and the words melt Kara's resolve. "I know it's not you, I know, why do you think I came here, please, just let me, please—"

She lets Not Lena stumble into her arms, pressing her face into the curve of her neck. She can feel the eyes on her back, but she lets herself be weak for a moment, pulls this broken version of Lena into her arms.

"It's okay." Her hands press into Lena's back, and she's suddenly holding her completely upright, her arms gentle and firm. "It's okay. I'm here. It's okay."

She holds her the same way when she flies her back to Lena's lab. Lena leaves them alone in the room, her eyes as close to terrified as Kara has ever seen them.

"I'm so sorry." Kara brushes the hair away from her eyes, smooths away a tear. "I don't know what happened, but I'm so, so sorry Lee."

This version of Not Lena isn't wearing any makeup. She's in jeans that don't fit quite right, an old rugby sweater that Kara recognizes from her own closet. She's looking at Kara as if she needs her to breathe, her hands still fixed on Kara as if she's the only thing anchoring her to the ground.

"No, this is—" She takes one of those deep breaths, the ones Lena always uses to center herself. "This is a gift. I don't know how you're here, how I'm here, but this is a gift."

She presses her hands to Kara's cheeks, runs her fingers along her jaw.

"I missed you so much, Kara." There's a tinge of desperation that is foreign to Kara. It freezes something in her core. "Every day, every second, I promise you, all I did was miss you."

This Not Lena clings. She tugs Kara close, and Kara just lets her. She looks up and sees her Lena in the doorway, her knuckles white, teeth gnawing at her lip, and she wants to apologize or pull away or do something, but all she can do is cling tight, to give what comfort she can where she can.

They send her back a few minutes later. This time, Kara stays. She holds Not Lena's hand until the breach is open, touches her hand to the small of her back as she stands.

"Just let me look." Not Lena steps all the way into her space, and her eyes are urgent, hungry, as they trace her features. "I don't want to forget you."

"It's not me, Lee. I'm not who you think I am."

"I know." And Not Lena leans up, presses her lips gently into the curve of her cheek. "But it's close enough."

Not Lena steps backward through the breach. She doesn't take her eyes off of Kara, not until she's disappeared.

Kara is shaking.

She doesn't realize until the breach snaps closed, but now she feels it, the trembling racking through her entire body. Lena sees, too, but she's as rattled as Kara, her whole face ashen. Kara looks at her and is swept, again, with the urge to apologize, to beg Lena to forget it.

"Lena, I'm—"

"I need to run more tests."

Lena's out of the room before Kara can ask her to stay. She wonders if she would've had the guts, even if she'd had the time.


	2. Chapter 2

They get almost two days' rest from the breaches. It's long enough that Kara finally goes to see if Lena fixed it and simply forgot to tell her. But when she reaches the lab, Lena is there, hair down and a little mussed, but otherwise seemingly still buried in the depths of her research.

For a moment, Kara watches her again. Lena's standing in the same place as before, her eyes fixed outside, her expression lost. Her hands are twisting, twisting, twisting the ring. 

"Hey." Kara taps at the doorframe, watches Lena's shoulders jerk slightly, stiffening. "I haven't been seeing double the last few days, is this all-"

"It's not fixed." Lena's voice is clipped, and Kara sucks in a shaky breath at it. She's still not used to the sudden bouts of coldness. "I'm sorry. I'm trying."

She moves slowly across the lab. Lena's eyes stay fixed on the papers in front of her, but she watches Kara out of the corner of her eyes, tracking her movements as she comes to lean next to her, arms folded, carefully studying the way her jaw clenches.

"Are you okay?" Kara reaches out timidly, but Lena leans into her hand almost immediately. "I know that the last one, it was a lot, and I know that—"

"Sometimes I think about you dying." Lena's voice is so quiet that Kara's not sure if a human could pick it up. "I think about what would happen, if you died, and things were still the way they are now."

Kara watches Lena as she turns, and she's suddenly aware of how close they are, her hand on Lena's shoulder, their faces only separated by a handful of inches. Lena is refusing to look at her, eyes fixed on the floor instead.

"I don't want to live with regret." Lena's hands are twisting at the ring yet again. "I don't want to spend all my days haunted by the memories of all the things I wanted to do, everything I wanted in life and was too afraid to ask for, but I'm so _scared_ to ask for it, because I saw what happens, I saw what happens when I care, when I let myself open up to this, and _nothing_ could break me the way that version of me was broken."

Lena's eyes burn into Kara's as she finally glances up.

"Nothing but you." 

Kara's hand slides up of its own accord, tracing the curve of Lena's throat, her jaw, resting on her cheek, and she leans in again, like muscle memory, thumb tipping Lena's face up towards hers. She inches closer, closer now, and then-

And then Lena's hands are on her chest, soft but firm. In reality, the motion should do nothing to Kara, but somehow Lena's human hands hit her like a ton of kryptonite. She stumbles backwards, and it's like she's plunging into ice water. Then Lena's hands are warm, holding her at arms length, but still keeping her close, as close as she can handle.

"Not now, Kara." Now it's Kara's turn to burn holes in the floor with her gaze. "Please, just not now. Just hold on for me for a bit."

"Right." She lifts her chin, twitches her jaw back and forth as she raises her eyes somewhere above Lena's head, hands drifting up to her hips in a shadow of the pose that always grounds her, strengthens her. "I should get back."

She almost uses her super speed to dash out of the lab, but remembers last minute the time that she did that and sent a whole stack of papers airborne with the gust from her movement. She walks, instead, feeling very slow and a little too human for her taste.

"You always call them Lee." Lena's voice freezes her, another plunge of ice down Kara's back. "Why?"

Kara turns, and she can see how hard Lena is attempting to be casual, to pretend like the question hasn't been gnawing at her since she first heard the pet name. She tries to make her voice gentle.

"It's what I call you, apparently." She shrugs. "Or, the other versions of me. That's what I call you when we're- you know. In the worlds where we're together."

"I like it." Lena offers a small smile and Kara thinks it's the most powerful kindness she's ever witnessed. "It's sweet. I like it a lot."

Kara smiles back. She knows it's her huge dorky smile, the one that makes her look just this side of manic, but she really couldn't care less.

"Noted." She shoves her glasses up a little further on her nose, and leaves with the smile still thick on her lips. 

The next breach quite literally opens up in Kara's lap. She's sitting on her couch, aimlessly flipping channels after an all-too-long day of hero work, and then a breach opens about three feet above her head and another Not Lena tumbles right into her lap, straight into a carton of potstickers with a yelp.

"I'm- what is this- Kara!" For a moment, Not Lena's weight is pressing into her almost uncomfortably, her hands scrabbling over Kara's shoulders, and then she's springing to her feet, whirling around, her eyes searching the apartment. "Kara, what the- where am I? What just-"

"It's okay." Kara holds her hands out, rising slowly as Not Lena whips back around, her eyes panicked. "It's all good. I'll explain this, don't worry. It's okay."

But this Not Lena is even more frantic than she's used to, spitting out half-questions as she paces around the room, shying away from Kara's touch.

"I don't understand, the last thing I know you're talking to me in the apartment, and then I'm- where _are_ we? Who's apartment is this? Did I- was I drugged? Am I hallucinating? Please tell me I'm hallucinating and- wait why are you dressed like that? Whose clothes are those? Kara, can you-"

"Lena." She follows Not Lena to the kitchen, then back through the dining room, into the living room, into the bedroom, back outside. "Lena. Please stop."

Finally, Kara corners her by the couch.

"Come here." She opens her arms. "Let me take you to your lab, you'll understand soon."

Not Lena takes a step in, lets Kara fold her into her arms, and she's just gotten them airborne, just flown out of the already open balcony window when she hears the question that leaps into a scream.

"Wait, what do you mean my la-"

She doesn't stop screaming until Kara touches down on the balcony at L-Corp. Immediately, the Not Lena bursts from her arms, moving so fast that she stumbles, almost crashing to the ground before Kara can grab her, softening her fall.

"Jeez, have I never taken you flying before?" Not Lena looks up at her with bewilderment and, Kara realizes with a jolt, fear.

"How the hell did you do that?" Not Lena whispers the words, voice shaking, and then the real Lena is stalking out onto the balcony, rolling her eyes.

"What's the story with this one?"

Not Lena almost breaks her neck looking back and forth between Kara and her doppelganger. Once. Twice. When she goes limp, Lena rolls her eyes again. 

"Okay, this one is a little pathetic." There's a glint of amusement in her eyes. "If I ever faint like that, you'd never let me live it down."

They both stand watch in the med bay, arms folded in almost identical postures.

"I don't think this one knows," Kara says. "She was so scared when I flew her here, it was definitely her first time in the air with me."

"Nice to know that other versions of you are as equally attracted to subterfuge." A few months ago, the dig would've had some real bite to it; now, Kara hears rather than sees Lena's smile. She adds a little nudge of her elbow to let Kara know that she's teasing (mostly). "This is one hell of a way to break the news."

When Not Lena comes to, finally, she confirms that she is wholly unaware of even the concept of a multiverse.

"I'm a _chemistry_ teacher not a- what exactly is it that you do?" Not Lena gestures wildly at Lena, who smirks back. "I teach, that's it, I have nothing to do, no way to help you-"

"We know," Kara says, gently pressing her arm. "You're here on accident, and I'm sorry."

It takes a little longer to prep this version for her exit, mainly because Kara is genuinely concerned about the toll that too much interdimensional travel could take on her body, and more importantly her mind, if she's not prepared. She tries her best to explain what happened, but apparently Lena is also curious, like so goddamn curious, in every single universe. So the more she explains, the more that Not Lena asks, and then it's been an hour and neither of them are better for it.

Plus, of course, there's the whole issue of the elephant in the room.

"So you had no clue that Kara was Supergirl?" Lena asks hesitantly. "I mean, nothing at all?"

Not Lena just stares at her dumbly, as if she's speaking another language.

"I'm sorry — that she's _who_?"

And then they learn about a world where there is no Supergirl, where the sun did nothing for Kryptonians, where Kara grew up without glasses and played basketball in college and became a coach at Midvale High School where, apparently, her best friend was the chemistry teacher. Of course. Lena is working her absolute best to swallow her smirk at the ridiculousness of the story, but Kara's eyes are bulging at the concept of a world where she's just Kara.

"I played basketball?"

"Yeah. Shooting guard at UCLA."

"And I was good?"

"Two-year All-American. You're a good coach, too."

"I've never played basketball."

"You should try, I'm sure the whole flying thing would help a ton around the rim."

Eventually, Lena pulls her off of her, because they have to send her back, they _really_ have to send her back, even if Kara would love to spend the next few days grilling Not Lena on every detail of this other version of herself. Of a normal version of herself.

They finally get her fully on board with the process of breaching back to her universe, and although she still seems wary of the whole process, Not Lena just shrugs when Kara asks if she's scared. So Lena sets up the device, and it's then that Kara decides to catch her wrist in one hand, a last ditch effort just to confirm something she's fairly certain of already.

"I just have to ask, what am I to you?" Lena arches an eyebrow, and Kara shrugs. "You know, like what am I over there to-"

"Kara." Not Lena says it with _that_ tone that doesn't change in any universe, the one that seems to say _I may understand the concept of a multiverse or interdimensional breaches but I sure as hell get _this_._ "You're my _wife_."

Kara barks out a laugh, and Lena slams the button to open the breach so hard she thinks the device might break. When it closes, Kara is grinning at her, all goofy and normal and it's so wholly endearing that Lena has to grip onto the edges of the table to keep from kissing her.

"So we're batting a thousand here, Ms. Luthor."

"You know I still know how to make kryptonite, right?" Again, her voice lacks any bite. "Don't tempt me."

"Oh, such a scary supervillain." Kara is backing out of the room, her hands held up in mock defense. "I'm quaking here, Ms. Luthor, someone please come and save me."

"Get out."

"I'm going."

"Now, you idiot."

"Goodbye, Lee."

Kara's gone with a _whoosh_, gone too quickly to see the flush that fills Lena's cheeks.


	3. Chapter 3

Kara should've known that this would happen, eventually.

That's all she can think when the 23rd Not Lena slams her out of the sky during a routine patrol on a Tuesday morning.

She was having a nice morning, too, which is perhaps the most infuriating part of it all. The new latte at Noonan's was actually good, and when she brought one to Lena she actually took a slight pause from working to sip at it, to ask Kara about her day. The newest suit she had developed was so comfortable, and the only work she had to do so far this morning resulted in petting an _extremely_ fluffy dog. It was a good morning. It was supposed to be a good day.

And then a Not Lena rocketed into her side, grabbed her by the back of the neck and tossed her through the side of a building, and that changed just a bit.

Lena picks up her phone with a smile. It's been a few days since Kara called of her own accord, and she can't help but miss her, even though they see each other every day, at the DEO or at CatCo, sometimes just when Kara brings by a bag full of lunch at the lab. Still, there's been something lacking in the side of their relationship that's just _them_ and no one else, the side that mainly features the two of them eating an aggressively large amount of food while Lena rants about science and Kara's eyes gleam back at her, the side where Lena always tucks her toes under Kara's knee when they're on the couch, because she's cold and Kara is always just a little overly warm.

She just misses _Kara_. And even though she's the one who's been keeping her distance, Lena still misses Kara, even when she's being stupid, even when she's pushing her away.

So she picks up the phone on the first ring.

"Hey Kara, I was just thinking-"

"Lena!" There's a yelp and a smash, then a whoosh that sounds like- did the phone just drop? And then another smash, and a thump, and a yell, and then Kara is shouting again. "Lena, we've got a problem."

And then Lena hears it, distinctly, in the background of the call.

"I swear to God I'm going to squash the life out of you like the roach you are."

Her shoulders sag. Lena knew to expect it, knew that eventually, this would most likely happen. After all, if every universe could have one constant predictability, then it had to have others, and the idea that Luthors would be evil everywhere else — well, that makes sense, too. It's unsurprising then that, in one of these worlds, Lena wouldn't be able to break free from that darkness.

Still, hearing her own voice breaks her heart just a little.

"Kara, is that—"

"Yeah, uh-" There's a crash, a _whump_, a gasp on the other line. "One of you is trying to kill me over here."

Lena covers the mouthpiece of her phone as she curses, the words flowing out in a steady stream.

"Shit Kara, what do you need?"

She waits as she hears the same noises, doing her best to distinguish them — the whoosh that must mean she's flying, the yells, the sudden crashes and gasps and thuds of the fight. There's a sizzling noise, and Kara lets out a particularly loud shout.

"Get to the DEO, I'll meet you there." Another crash, and Kara curses in Kryptonian. "_Hurry_."

Lena pulls up less than 15 minutes later, her arms full of files as she pushes her way through security, Alex already there, half-pulling her into the command center. They've hardly settled into place, files dropped and spread on a free table, when Kara drops onto her landing balcony outside, storming into the DEO at a quick clip, her face smudged with soot.

"Well I hated _that_." Lena isn't expecting it when Kara marches straight by Alex and slams square into her, arms wrapping like a vice around her ribs, fingers tugging at the back of her sweater. She presses her face into Lena's neck, sucking in a deep breath, and Lena lets herself be selfish, lets her eyes flutter shut for a moment. "Please promise you'll never go on a furious rampage and try to kill me."

Lena laughs, running her hands up Kara's back.

"Never." Her eyes flit shut again, leaning her weight fully onto Kara's frame. "I've got your back."

"This is really touching and all, but-" Alex stalks by them, eyebrows raised. "Can we focus on the version of Lena who _is_ trying to kill you?"

Kara explains everything that she could deduce from the half-hour that she spent fighting the Not Lena over National City. It's not a lot — this Not Lena is wearing a Lexosuit, similar to the one that her Lena had built but more highly armored and weaponized. It was almost as fast as Kara, and while it didn't necessarily have the same raw strength, it was well-equipped to keep her from ever keeping a stronghold, making her extremely difficult to detain. 

Oh, and this Not Lena seems to hate Kara with every bone in her body.

"She kept saying she'd make me pay." Kara shakes her head. "I don't know what for, but I'm guessing there was some serious bad blood on their Earth."

"So what's the move?" Alex studies a copy of Lena's prototype for her most recent suit, tracing the outline of a gauntlet with her fingertip. "You need to get out there as soon to avoid giving her too much time to wreak havoc anywhere else in the city."

"How about my normal move?" Kara shrugs, folding her arms. "I'll punch her out of the sky."

Alex and Lena both roll their eyes at the same time.

"Kara, you can't punch your way through every problem." Lena takes the blueprint out of Alex's hands. "We need an actual _plan_."

Kara rolls her eyes in response, stalking across the room, waving her hand as if to tell them _okay, get on with it_.

They figure out the plan pretty quickly, actually. Lena points out that the Lexosuit isn't perfect; far from it, in fact. It's modeled after Kara's flight patterns, but it's not physically capable of imitating both the force and the finesse of Kara in the air. It can't stop on a dime, can't invert and twist its way through the sky. Lena had never mastered a hydraulics system with the capacity of mirroring this type of flight; she assumes that Not Lena hit the same hitch as well.

"So you just need to out-fly her," Alex says, her eyes still narrowed with focus.

"Exactly." Lena gestures towards Kara, who is giving her the sweetest smile, visibly attempting to hide her boredom. "Get her to invert too many times, and the suit will stall."

"And then-" Kara's smirk is so wide that it threatens to split her face in two, and Lena chokes on her own smile. "I punch her out of the sky."

"Oh my Go-" Alex drops the stack of files on the table with an indignant thud. "Honestly, what is wrong with you?"

Kara flashes that big old All-American smile, popping her fists up onto her waist as she turns that beaming expression towards Lena.

"You ready for me to kick your ass?"

Lena winces.

"Go easy on the moneymaker, okay?" Lena gestures towards her face, biting back a smile. "This is worth a lot, you hear? In any universe."

"You got that right." Something about the earnest way that Kara says it sends a thrill singing up Lena's spine. She averts her eyes before she does something _actually_ stupid. "I'll head out now."

Alex runs through the plan again, even though Kara just waves her off, muttering something along the lines of, "Yeah, yeah, fly fast, hit hard." She tries to run off before Alex has even finished talking, and it's only Lena's voice that holds her back.

"Hey." Lena holds up her hand, fingers wrapped around a small black box, the most important thing that she brought over from L-Corp. "You actually think you're going anywhere without this?"

Kara practically skips back to stand in front of her, hopping to a stop and sticking her chest out for Lena to place the box over the crest of El. It quickly ripples, unfolding to encase Kara's suit in a black material with a slight black sheen, folding over her head in a half-hood, half-helmet covering.

"Anti-kryptonite shell." Lena taps her fingers against Kara's chest as she grins down at the new suit, flexing her fists. "And it'll scramble the signal on any heat seeking missiles. A few other bells and whistles, but we won't need them today."

"And pants. I'm never getting over the pants." Her eyes flash back at Lena, big and blue and almost too happy. "Have I told you before that you can make _all_ of my suits?"

"You've been saying that for six months." She gives her chest a little shove. "Get out there, Supergirl."

When Kara launches off the balcony, sending them both a cocky salute, Alex grabs Lena.

"Get your suit," she hisses, her hand a vice on Lena's wrist. "Go follow her, and don't let her hear you."

"Alex." Lena's voice is soft, insistent — not a denial, but a warning. "The last time I tried to back up Kara in the field, she actually lost it on me."

"I'm sure it wasn't that bad-"

"She threatened to lock me in an unmarked room and force me to listen to the Cats original cast recording at full volume."

"Oh." There's a smile at the corner of Alex's mouth. "Yeah, that's a hefty threat."

"She and I are just finally doing kind of okay," Lena murmurs. "I don't want to risk messing that up."

Alex nods, rubbing her face.

"I know." She looks at Lena, and her eyes look scared, filled with the type of fear that only Kara can cause in Alex. "But do you really think she's going to be able to punch any version you out of the sky? No hesitation?"

Lena glances at her, then nods.

"I'll suit up."

It doesn't take long to tempt Not Lena out into the sky. Actually, it takes five minutes. All Kara has to do is fly high enough over the city and yell. Loud. 

Not Lena doesn't even take the time to yell a hostile greeting, just dives straight into the fight. Kara dips, flips, twists away from her. She flies as fast as she can, turning tightly, dropping 30 stories out of the sky without warning, looping up towards the clouds. 

And Lena was right — the suit is good, great really, but it's not good enough to keep up with Kara. It falters, keels one way or the other ever so slightly. And when she pulls them into an even tighter backwards loop, corkscrewing away from a blast from Not Lena's forearm, it finally happens. Not Lena's suit seizes up for a moment, and then suddenly it's pointed down, plummeting, falling down down down—

And Kara can't do it.

She sees Lena's body falling out of the sky, and she can't do it. She drops as fast as she can, racing towards the suit, grabbing it with one hand, then two, and tugging Not Lena up and into her arms. She lands on solid ground, cradling Not Lena's body to the ground, even as she twists out of her arms. There's a whirring noise from her forearm, and then—

Kara ricochets backwards, hitting the ground hard and sliding through gravel. She lets out a grunt, rolling to her feet as the Not Lena stands, taking a menacing towards her.

"I don't want to hurt you." Kara always means it when she says those words, but she's never meant it more than now, when Not Lena's visor retracts and her eyes burn across the space separating them. "Please, Lena."

"That trick isn't going to work." She hears a slight quaver in Not Lena's voice, and it makes her hesitate. "Not today."

That hesitation costs Kara when the next blast hits her straight in the chest. It bowls Kara over, head over heels, and as she's tumbling she sends up a silent thank you to Lena for the suit, which fully absorbed a shot of what was _definitely_ ionized kryptonite. She jumps to her feet, ducks and slips under two more blasts. She looks up, sees the anger in Not Lena's eyes, and tries the next dumb thing that pops into her head.

"Lee." She yells it, and Not Lena freezes, stutters. "Please don't make me hurt you."

Not Lena's eyes are wild, but Kara knows how to read them — anger, hurt, but underneath it all, confusion.

"Don't." She takes a step towards Kara, and the unbridled rage in her eyes in foreign to her. "I warned you, I'm not stupid enough to think that you're her."

Kara pulls up short.

"Wait, what?"

She doesn't have time to say anything else, because Not Lena is pulling her arm up for another shot, and just as Kara is bracing for another blow, she hears a whistle from just overhead, and—

A silver streak of metal hits Not Lena like a freight train, slamming her bodily into the gravel, hard enough to plough out a trench several feet deep with the force of her suit hitting the ground. The metal — which is a suit, another Lexosuit — straightens up with a small whoop.

"Sorry." Lena's helmet retracts, and she grimaces in Kara's direction. "Overshot that a bit."

Kara's mouth hangs half-open, pointing between Lena and the limp form of Not Lena's suit on the ground. She's trying very hard to balance an immense wave of anger with a small gleam of pride in how fluidly Lena pulled up out of that dive to collide with her doppelganger. (She's also very, very distracted by the way this suit defines Lena's waist, but that's a whole different problem.)

"You were hesitating." Lena shrugs. "Sorry."

She doesn't look sorry at all.

"I take it you can fly yourself back." Kara growls, stalking past to grab Not Lena with two hands, not looking back before she takes off. By the time Lena lands at the DEO, she can hear Kara inside, yelling at her sister. Maybe not yelling. Kara hates the concept of yelling, but her voice is definitely raised, and there are definitely a few choice Kryptonian words slipping into her diction.

"You let her take the _suit_?" Alex is actually cowering for once, at least slightly, and it heartens Lena to see that she's not the only one overwhelmed by Kara. That is, until she lands, helmet retracting as she takes a few tentative steps forward, and Kara whirls on her. "What were you thinking? What were you both thinking?"

"They were thinking that you've never been able to raise a hand to Lena." J'onn's voice is low, warning. "We know she's your weak point. We weren't taking the risk."

For a moment, Kara just stares at all of them, mouth slightly agape. Lena isn't sure what to say, a flush creeping up the back of her neck, so she focuses carefully on removing her suit piece by piece.

"Is my doppelganger in holding?"

Kara finally finds her voice again, clearing her throat quickly.

"Yeah, they took her down a minute ago." She allows herself a glance at Kara, sees that her eyes are drilling into her. "She's still out cold."

"Sorry." Lena winces. She means it a little more now that Kara isn't in the middle of a battlefield staring down a murderous double with her hands at her sides. "I saw her aiming at you and—"

"You did great," Alex cuts her off, shoulders a little more squared now that she's not facing down Kara one on one." And now we need to figure out what to do with her."

"Well we can't send her back," Lena says, and she's surprised to see Kara open her mouth in protest. "Kara, no. We're not sending an- an _evil_ version of me back, especially not one that wants to kill you. I'm not putting any version of you at risk like that."

She feels Kara's annoyed huff as much as she hears it.

"I know that." Kara rubs at her forearm, the little twitch that always comes out when she's thinking a little too hard. "But there's something off about this whole thing. She kept saying something when we were fighting about not getting tricked by me again."

"She's going to ask to talk to her," Alex mutters. "Just watch, here she goes, in three, two-"

"Yes, I want to talk to her!" Kara yelps, looking frantically between the two of them. "I'm not the one who nose dived into her, anyways. I was getting through to her about something, I swear-"

"Just- go." Alex isn't even looking at her, annoyance rigid in her features. "Do your optimism number for now, we'll do my thing later."

Both of them hear Kara's mutter of "Your _torture_ thing" as she sweeps off to the holding wing, cape fluttering unnecessarily behind her.

When she reaches holding, the Not Lena is awake and pacing.

"Let me the hell out of here," she hisses. Kara smiles, her hands held up in her gentlest posture, but it does nothing to calm her. "You can drop this facade, you're not getting anything out of me."

"Lee, I'm telling you, it's not—"

"Don't _call_ me that." The shout is paired with a slam of Not Lena's fist on the glass, which is a little dramatic, but Kara does understand that the situation is a bit stressful. "I don't know what you're playing at with all of this shape shifting but you're not going to convince me that you're Kara, because I _know_ where Kara is right now, because I left her in the med bay because of what _you_ did to her-"

"Wait, what-"

"And when she is healed, I can promise you she'll track you down-"

"Lena, hold on-"

"And she's going to turn this entire building into dust, so I swear to _God_-"

"Lena." The sudden slide of the door separating them surprises Not Lena so much that she jumps back. "Please listen to me. I'm not going to hurt you."

An alarm sounds the second that the door to the holding cell opens. Lena and Alex skid into the room only minutes later, both arriving at a full sprint, to see the Not Lena telling an animated story, Kara's eyes tracing the path of her hands as they stir up the air in front of her. It takes a few minutes to convince Alex to holster her weapon, but eventually, Kara is able to convince them to sit down somewhere that doesn't resemble a cell.

It turns out that this Not Lena comes from an earth under siege from an alien race of shape shifters who, most recently, had been wreaking havoc by taking on the form of Supergirl and other DEO agents to stage attacks throughout the city. She was literally en route to track down a shapeshifter who had taken the form of Kara when the breach had pulled her through; Not Lena had assumed it was just part of the fight until now.

"So you _don't_ want to kill Kara?" Lena asks, her tone still guarded. Not Lena's eyes widen, a bewildered look flooding her features.

"Why the hell would I want to kill my fiancee?"

Alex almost manages to contain her slight hiccup of laughter. Almost.

"Oh- you're- oh, um- congratulations?" Kara is bright red, and Lena smiles at her hands folded on the table in front of her. Not Lena looks carefully between the two of them, one eyebrow arching slightly.

"Okay, well, with all of _that_ explained, you can probably see that I need to get back." She looks to Lena now, expectantly. "Now, if possible."

"Right." Kara and Lena both stand hastily. "Yep, we'll- let's go."

Even with the weight of her own world on her shoulders, even with the impending fight with a shapeshifting alien looming in the near-future, Not Lena's eyes light up the moment that they enter the lab. She's already grabbing at the mainframe controls before Lena can step in protectively.

"I can help, if you want." She glances between Lena and Kara, her face bright with curiosity. "I mean, I could use a bite to eat anyways, if I'm being honest."

"On it." Kara blasts away without hesitation at the mention of food, leaving the two versions of Lena in her lab. She lets out a sigh and spreads her hands, lifting her palms up in a gesture of offering. Not Lena grins and immediately dives in, fingers moving quickly over the keyboard, eyes flitting up and down over Lena's most recent files from her research into the breach. It's quiet, peaceful in the lab for a moment, and Lena relaxes into it.

Then, Not Lena turns to her, eyes narrowed, clinical.

"So how long have you had this solved?"

Lena squeezes her eyes shut.

"About a week."

"About?"

"Ten days." She pauses, eyes darting left, then right. "Okay, eleven."

"Why?"

Lena twists at her ring, jaw clenching. She's not sure how to explain this, the lost feeling that has filled her for over a year now, the strange warmth that has come from her shared moments with Kara over the past few weeks. She doesn't know how to explain that she's finally feeling whole again, and that she's terrified that once all this stops, she'll have to face the thing that scares her the most head-on.

"Things with me and Kara- they're complicated here." Her hands twist, twist. "It's been hard between us for awhile, and things have just started feeling normal again. I guess I'm just terrified of what will happen when we don't have a crisis to distract us anymore."

"Well, knowing Kara's lifestyle, there will always be a crisis."

"True." They're both smiling, and Lena wonders what her double is thinking of, what memory this is drawing up. "It's just- There's been- Everything seems to point to this thing with us being big. Like, bigger than anything I've ever felt before."

Not Lena just looks at her, eyebrows raised, waiting for further explanation.

"We've met over 20 of these other versions of me- of us." Lena sighs. "And all of them are in love with her. All of them."

There's a pause, and then Not Lena laughs, low from her chest.

"Well, that's kind of obvious." 

Lena just watches as she laughs, and eventually the amusement overtakes her as well, because if she's being honest, all of this is a little obvious and a little ridiculous and she _knows_ that. It doesn't make it any easier.

"You need to tell her." Not Lena's voice is soft, and Lena hates her for it, if only because she longs for the amount of ease that seems to fill this version of herself whenever she talks about her Kara. "Look, I was terrified when I realized that I couldn't run from how I felt anymore. I tried to run even more. But eventually, you'll run out of room to run, and I promise you'll be so glad when you can finally just come home to her."

There's probably more that Not Lena could say, but Kara reappears with a grin and several armfuls of brown bags full of food, her eyes so big and bright and her smile so wildly wide. They bundle the Not Lena off towards her new breach several minutes later, arms filled with a few days' worth of takeout. 

"Don't be afraid." She says it gently yet with force, eyes fierce on Lena. Kara looks between them, her face twisting into a sweet look of confusion. "You have nothing to be afraid of, I promise."

"I know." The breach opens, and Lena smiles. "I won't."


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a heads up: it gets a little more M-rated at the end

Finally, Kara gives up.

She's so tired. She hasn't been able to sleep in weeks, spending each night flat on her back, staring at the ceiling, tracing every detail she knows about each Not Lena over and over in her head.

There's the Not Lena whose hair was auburn, falling in soft long waves down her back, who ran her hands through Kara's blonde hair with naked fascination, murmuring that it was beautiful both ways. There's the Not Lena who told her about the time that she accidentally destroyed her favorite crepe place — like fully, completely knocked it to the ground, with no one in it — during a fight and built it back up by hand overnight. There's the Not Lena who spluttered and stammered in full-on denial when Kara asked her about her feelings, hands clenching and unclenching and twisting at that damn ring until finally she admitted, face red as the sun on Krypton, that she sometimes thought about kissing her. There's the Not Lena who proposed in Paris, the Not Lena who was proposed to mid-flight because there was a nuclear bomb and apparently Kara had said "no time like the present." 

There's the Not Lena who had retired from tech three months after meeting Kara because she was afraid of making anything that might hurt her. There's the Not Lena who hugged Alex in a vice-like grip the moment she saw her, hard enough to make Alex tear up, the unexplained grief written visibly across her face. There's the Not Lena who claimed that her Kara hates pizza.

And now, there's this one. The Not Lena who crept into her room at 3 a.m. — because no, Supergirl does _not_ have a reason to lock her apartment, no matter how many times Alex claims she does — and is now burrowing into her side in bed. Kara is just close enough to sleep, just drowsy and _exhausted_ enough to consider caving. To consider how bad it would be, actually, if she just let this Not Lena keep winding her hand through her hair. But then Not Lena hooks her ankle around Kara's calf, pressing her lips gently to her collarbone, and Kara knows that this is wrong, like, really wrong, if for any reason than for the pure fact that Kara is only allowing it because she's imagining this being someone else.

"Kara, 'm sorry 'm so late," Not Lena yawns into her throat, and Kara reaches up, tugging away her hands.

"Lee." She nudges Not Lena onto her side, pushes her chin up, looks into those deep green eyes that are sagging closed from exhaustion. "Lena, hey, look at me."

Her eyes open fully, thick with confusion as Kara stands, pads around her room to throw on a sweatshirt and tennis shoes, cinching up the waistband of her joggers as Not Lena pulls her knees up to her chest in bed. She comes to stand in front of her, and Not Lena stares at her, carefully.

"I'm not who you think I am."

"I don't understand."

"Do you still trust me?"

Kara offers her hand, and Not Lena takes it, stepping into her space, letting her swoop her up into her arms in that same effortless, breathless way.

"Always."

Kara can smell the scotch the moment she lands on the balcony of Lena's office. They'd already flown by her apartment — "That is _not_ my apartment," Not Lena had mumbled — which was empty, black, no sign of her heartbeat. But she can hear it, erratic, a little too slow, the moment they're a half mile out from the L-Corp building.

That's also when she picks up on the single malt scotch. Her heightened sense of smell is typically the most played down of Kara's powers, but it's come in handy one too many times in helping her predict when either Alex or Lena will be deep in a surly, drunken mood.

She touches down and is greeted by that exact sight — Lena, with only one light on in her office, cradling a bottle of her favorite liquor in both hands as if it's the purest love of her life. Her eyes are murky, clouded by the apparently _very_ large amount of the bottle she's already consumed.

"Kara-"

"Another breach." Kara lets the Not Lena down softly, wincing at the way her eyes widen in confusion at seeing her mirror image. "I explained it to her on the way over, she's ready to go home."

"Right." There's a bit to Lena's voice, and she sloshes the scotch around the bottle. "That's the only reason you'd come to see me."

Kara rolls her eyes, jaw clenched. Lena's lucky she doesn't put a foot through the floor with frustration.

"We both know that's not true." They lock eyes, and Lena's too drunk to even glare properly. Kara rolls her eyes again. "I'm taking her down to the lab to breach her back. You stay here, don't drink any more of that."

She jabs her finger in Lena's direction with the last few syllables, every ounce of Supergirl possible in her voice.

"You need to work on your coping mechanisms."

"Yeah, well you need to work on your-"

"Don't finish that."

They glare at each other again, until the Not Lena clears her throat awkwardly.

"Can I please go home now?" Her voice is still a little gravely with sleep, and Kara softens, steering her out by the elbow. As the door closes, she hears Lena swallow another mouthful of scotch, and tugs Not Lena to a stop.

"Just a second."

She pulls a full Barry, darting in and out of the room, grabbing the bottle of scotch and replacing it with a flagon of water, speeding back into the hallway in under a second. Back in the office, she hears Lena's offended gasp, and she peels off with Not Lena as quickly as the human can keep up.

(It's not like she's really _scared_ of Lena, but it's just best to clear the area after removing alcohol from her hands.)

"Is that what I look like when I'm drunk?" murmurs Not Lena, and there's enough bewilderment in her tone of voice to force a low chuckle out of Kara.

The breaching takes only a few moments, the technology easy enough to operate after watching Lena perform the same function 37 times — because yes, this is the 38th Not Lena, not that she's counting — and Kara makes it back up to the office within a half hour.

She's grateful to see that Lena has consumed at least half of the water since she left, but that's where the feeling stops. Lena is standing on the balcony now, both hands gripping the railing, and Kara knows from the set of her shoulders that she's in for a fight.

"Lee." Kara says it softly now, because she's too tired to fight, too tired to be dishonest with Lena any longer. "Please tell me what's going on."

"Nothing." Lena bites the word out. "I accidentally ripped holes in the continuum of the multiverse and my best friend is a flying superhero who hardly talks to me anymore. Everything is totally normal."

She draws out the first syllable in "totally," her sarcasm an edge meant to cut Kara. It works, even if she knows that Lena doesn't mean it, even if she's fairly certain that she's drunk enough to not remember all of this tomorrow. 

"Lena, I'm here." 

Kara knows what she needs, and she intends to be that, even if it means taking the brunt of Lena's anger. She's become familiar enough with this over the past year, knows well enough that Lena's coping methods aren't quite on the right side of healthy. It's a dynamic that had disappeared from their relationship months ago, when Lena started going to therapy and began removing herself from situations like this one instead of being caustic. But Kara can see how weak Lena feels, and she's willing to accept this if that's a necessity.

So she crosses the space between them, fills the gap, slides one hand up Lena's back and feels the way she slowly crumbles under it, slumping under the softness of the touch.

"I know this has been hard." Kara lowers her voice as much as she can, softens it as much as she can bear. "I know it's unfair and I know that you're angry. It's okay. You can be angry at me. I can take it. It's okay."

"I don't _want_ to be angry at you," Lena growls, turning her head so suddenly, eyes wet and fierce, clear as crystal now. "I can't stand being angry with you."

"It's okay though." Kara rubs her thumb against Lena's shoulder. Something primal in her gut notes how soft Lena's skin is under her touch, but she shoves that down, down, _down_. "You can be mad, even if it doesn't make sense."

"I'm not mad at you."

There's a silence, broken only by the ragged intake of Lena's breath.

"I'm mad at myself."

Kara tips her head. This is her specialty — she might be best known for fighting crime and aliens and Nazis and everything in between, but the thing she works hardest at, the thing she prides herself most on, is her ability to combat Lena's self hatred.

"Lena." Her other hand comes around, fingers slipping against the skin of Lena's jaw — and _seriously_ what moisturizer does she use, because it isn't human to feel this soft, this warm — as she tips her head up to meet Kara's eyes. "You have done nothing wrong."

"Yes I have."

"No you haven't, listen-"

"I solved the breaches." Kara stops cold, her hand frozen, keeping Lena's head tipped up even when she clearly, desperately wants to drop her gaze. "I figured out how to fix it weeks ago."

"_Lena._" Kara sounds breathless. "Why?" 

Those eyes are huge and so blue, so very very blue, and Lena wishes she had never done anything to make Kara look at her like this.

"Why do you think?"

"_Why_?"

"Because-" Lena's eyes flit around desperately, her lips bobbing open and shut, completely at a loss for words. She looks at Kara for a second, two seconds, eyes huge and lost and full of something that's been building for weeks, for months, something that Kara has tried to ignore in her eyes for as long as she's known Lena, something ragged and precarious.

And then, because the scotch is still sitting low in her belly, sending a small blaze of something like courage down to her toes and up through her fingertips, Lena tips her head up and closes the distance she's been protecting since the moment she met Kara.

Lena kisses her, hard, years worth of longing and betrayal and love and loyalty caught up in the way their mouths slide against each other. She expects the softness of Kara's lips, and the firmness of her stomach as she drops a hand there, gently, the slight ripple of muscle as she kneads her thumb gently into her abdomen. What she doesn't expect is the gasp, then the low, almost animalistic groan that the kiss pulls out of Kara. She doesn't expect her hands around her waist, pressing her into the small of her back, pulling them together so tightly that all of the air whooshes out of Lena's lungs, and now she knows what it means to be kissed breathless.

Lena also doesn't expect Kara to push her backwards with her hips, trying to move them literally anywhere, and when it happens her body moves before the signal can get to her feet and she stumbles, rather hard, and although Kara's arms are a vice around her and she could easily handle Lena's body weight at any time, it sends a shock through Kara, and she rips away suddenly.

"You're drunk." She's saying it to herself as much as anyone. Lena feels the loss of her physical contact like a blow to her chest. "You're drunk and you're not going to remember this and-"

"Kara, that's not true." Lena feels desperate, like she's begging, as Kara untangles them, stepping back frantically, her eyes wide. "Kara I meant that-"

"You're drunk, and I took advantage of you like a huge jerk, and-"

"Kara, stop-"

"I knew you were drunk, too, I knew that, I should've left-"

"Kara, _please_."

She's used to Kara's panics, the way she paces, talking to herself, and she knows that loud volume is typically the only way to cut through it. That works this time, and she looks up at Lena, looking every bit like a deer in the headlights.

"Come back tomorrow." Lena takes a hesitant step, then another, towards Kara. "If you don't believe me, come back tomorrow."

"Tomorrow?" Kara's voice cracks on the last syllable. "You mean-"

"Just promise me you'll come back." She's close enough now to reach for Kara's hand, and she lets Lena take it, lets her run a thumb over her knuckles. "Please."

"Okay." Kara nods, her eyes still full of fear. "Lena, I'm-"

"Tomorrow."

Kara flies her home, slowly so as not to contribute to the nausea beginning to pile in the pit of Lena's stomach. She manages to tug off her shoes and peel off her dress before collapsing in bed, head swimming with the heaviness of the day but mainly with a deep, base need for sleep.

She should be used to hangovers. That's the first thing she thinks when the glint of sunlight wakes her in the morning, piercing her skull with the first throb of a headache. Lena manages to clamber to her feet, washing down the taste of stale scotch with toothpaste, a glass of water and a handful of ibuprofen.

Kara was wrong. She wasn't too drunk to forget the night before; if anything, she remembers _too_ much, and it sends an ache straight down to her toes when she thinks of that noise, the one she drew out of Kara with just her lips and the press of their hips together. It makes Lena feel feral. 

She drinks a cup of coffee to try to calm the way her hands shake, slightly, but after an hour of staring at her phone, then throwing it down, then picking it up to stare again, she has to accept that it's Kara making her go this crazy. _No surprise there_, she thinks to herself.

She wonders, briefly, if Kara is even going to come. But she knows her well enough, knows that her inherent goodness guarantees that she'll show up, at some point or another. It takes two hours, but finally there's a tap on the door. It's timid, and Lena can imagine Kara on the other side of the door, fidgeting with the sleeves of whatever sweater she's wearing, shifting from foot to foot. She sucks in a breath, so deep it hurts her lungs, as she opens the door.

Kara is there, her hair up and her glasses shifting a little too low on the bridge of her nose, but she can't adjust them because her arms are full of takeout food — smoothies and coffee and what appears to be half of a bakery, balancing carefully.

"Hi." She flashes a small, hopeful smile. "I brought a hangover cure."

Lena tugs her into the apartment, matching her smile, gesturing to the kitchen for her to drop the armful. And Kara, of course, starts babbling.

"Look, I just want you to know that I care about you, and I never-" she places both smoothies on the counter, kale and carrot juice and apricot for Lena, some concoction with peanut butter and chocolate for herself "-would want to cross any line with our friendship-" Lena walks carefully behind her, watching as she now unloads the hot lattes onto the marble surface, because those were the items she was most worried about "-and I need you to know that whatever you want to do from here, I completely understand-" and finally, _finally_ she puts down the three bags of baked goods, although now she seems to think it's necessary to remove every item from said bags "- and if you need space again, that's totally okay, because I've fought for you before and I will fight to make this right again-" 

Lena's heart swells at those words, and she loses her patience entirely, reaches out with both hands to grab Kara's waist and spin her, using the element of surprise completely to muscle her up against the counter and kiss her firmly on the mouth, even though she's holding a croissant in either hand. She pulls back, just long enough to rest their foreheads against each other, to give Kara a moment to process.

"Oh."

Kara drops the croissants. Her hands fist in Lena's shirt. Her eyes are so, so blue and beseeching and Lena couldn't say no to her right now, not for anything.

"Can I?"

"_Please_."

Something in Lena's voice is raw, so much so that it draws out that low noise from Kara again, and then they're floating for a second, Kara tugging Lena up into the air and completely off balance, and she curses in Kryptonian, settles them to the ground before pressing Lena's back into the fridge. The cool touch of metal makes Lena gasp, and it rips their lips apart for a moment, but Kara just takes the moment to drop her mouth to Lena's throat, nipping and then pressing in harder, her fingers gripping Lena's ribcage just the right side of too hard.

"Kara."

Her name falls off her lips in gasps, as she tugs Lena up into her arms and then back into her bedroom, as she pulls off her shirt and accidentally rips off her own sweater, as she cradles her face in one hand and runs her nails down her side with the other. Lena murmurs Kara's name like a prayer, like a plea, and Kara listens every time, her lips so gentle along her jaw, her collarbone, her hipbones that she can hardly find the presence of mind to breathe.

She finds quickly that Kara is just off balance. She realizes it when she succeeds in flipping them, in pressing Kara down into the mattress, her hands soaking in every inch of her skin. Lena knows, in an intelligent sort of way, that she wants to savor this at some point, that she wants to take her time and map out every single inch of her body, that she's never seen so much of Kara at once before, her skin normally covered from head to toe in a supersuit or a cardigan and slacks, and now that she has she's intoxicated by it.

But Lena needs Kara now in a heady way she's never experienced, especially not sober at 11:30 a.m. on a Saturday. So she rushes, fumbles at her belt until Kara gets fed up and pulls it off with a quick motion, the easy flex of her forearm sending Lena's hips jolting down mindlessly. 

It's moments later, when every scrap of clothing lies on the floor next to the bed, when Lena brackets her hips between her thighs, runs her hand lower lower _lower_, that Kara seems to snap conscious.

"Lena."

The warning tone immediately freezes Lena. She seems to shrink into herself, so much so that Kara sits up, kisses her immediately, attempting to push away any self doubt with her lips on Lena's, smoothing her hair with one hand, holding her close with the flat of her palm on the curve of her back, holding her in place.

"I'm going to hurt you," Kara whispers. "If I lose control, I'm going to hurt you, and I can't risk that."

Something flashes in Lena's eyes, a moment of understanding passing between them, but then her hand is on Kara's chest, and she's pushing, and Kara is following out of confusion if nothing else. The look in Lena's eyes is hungry and desperate, but underneath it something else is glowing, that warm, fierce look that always fills Lena's eyes when Kara comes to her defense.

"You're not going to hurt me." There's no doubt in Lena's voice, no shake, no question. It's a command. It's a promise. It's trust. "You would never hurt me."

Her hand moves down again, slips past her hip bone, moves into the warm, wet heat, fingers slipping and then pressing and Kara gasps, arches, eyes rolling back slightly before she fixes them back on Lena. Her hand is still pressing down on Kara's chest, her eyes insistent and fierce.

"Lena."

She knows that she'll stop the second that Kara asks her to, knows that this isn't about control, but about trust. She knows what this means to Lena, and it makes her heart ache.

"You won't hurt me."

Lena presses deeper into Kara, and she lets out a soft moan, the noise ripped from her lungs instinctively. When she drops her head next to Kara's throat, she murmurs the words again, and again, and Kara murmurs them back just as fervently.

"I won't hurt you."

Her hand is relentless, knowing how much Kara can take. It's their first time, and it's imperfect as all first times are, but Lena hears every catch of her breath, every time she murmurs a quiet "Rao" and she quickly hones in on what Kara needs, finding it and chasing it until Kara's eyes are screwed shut and her hands are fisted in the sheets.

"Lee."

"I've got you."

Kara falls apart under her, trembling, arching into Lena as she presses her mouth to the curve of her jaw, and Lena repeats it over and over. She repeats it again when Kara flips them, her mouth trailing down Lena's sides, settling low and drawing the same raw sounds from Lena, until she's aching and twitching too much to function, pulling Kara onto her and basking in the warmth of her body weight pressing onto her.

"How long?" 

Kara's eyes are gentle when she asks it, nudging Lena's cheek with her nose, pressing a soft kiss to her cheekbone. Lena knows what she means, and she can't bite back the smile, doesn't even try to.

"Always."


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> holy shit this is done and I wrote it about 10x faster and longer than I planned on but whew I'm glad I did. this has been a super fun ride, I really thought this would be a one-shot but I'm glad people read it and liked it and hopefully I can write some more things at some point or another. I'm still getting used to writing these two together and honestly I hate about 50 percent of this fic now but hopefully the next one will be even better.

Lena should've known better than to expect any time uninterrupted with Kara, but she had hoped. Even if it was just for a morning, for a few hours.

To be fair, they went longer than normal without Kara's DEO-issued phone buzzing, long enough that Kara's stomach eventually rumbles so loudly that Lena has to laugh. She traces the line of Kara's abdominals, finger sinking a little lower, but then there's a second rumble and she pulls back, laughing lightly.

"You want to go get food?" Kara's eyes brighten at the question, and when Lena gives a little shooing gesture in response to her nod, she zips out of bed and into her clothes too fast to even see. "Grab me some of those beignets, will you?"

"From New Orleans or from France?"

She swears to God she'll never get tired of that cheeky little superhero smile.

"I was thinking about the place down the block, but by all means, knock yourself out." 

Kara clambers back onto the bed, straddling Lena for a moment to pepper her face with kisses, landing them on her cheeks, her eyebrows, her jaw, her nose.

"Be back in a flash." She presses one more, this time to Lena's lips, then leaps out of bed. She pauses by the balcony window, her face scrunched up. "Guess that's not my catchphrase, right?"

"Get out of here."

She can hear Kara's laugh even after she's flown out the window.

Lena decides that she's let enough of the morning slip away, pulling on a sweatshirt and pants and opening up her laptop for the first time since the night before. It's rare for her to check her email this late in the morning, and she has to laugh again, because her inbox is already backed up somehow. On a Saturday.

She's only made it through the fifth one by the time Kara swoops back in, a bag of beignets and a tray of lattes filling her hands. She stands in the doorway until Lena looks up, and she startles at the slightly hurt expression filling Kara's features.

"You put clothes on." Kara looks like a kicked puppy, and even though she knows it's mostly joking, a ploy to get her back into bed, Lena can't help but want to soothe it out of her. "That wasn't part of the breakfast agreement."

Lena shuts the laptop.

"Then come here and fix it."

It's later, when Kara has pulled off all her clothes and made her legs weak again, when she's left for the kitchen to heat up their coffees for the second time, that the interruption comes in the form of a breach. Right above Lena's bed. Where she's laying, naked.

And then another of her doubles falls into bed next to her.

For a moment, they stare at each other, mouths wide open, gasping for air and for words. Then, Kara walks in with a huge smile on her face, which drops immediately, eyes bulging, at the sight of two Lenas in her bed.

She drops the coffee, too.

Kara is certain that this would be someone else's fantasy. Maybe anyone else's. Honestly, it might have done something for _her_ in a different situation, but right now, she's too overwhelmed to do anything more than gape. All three of them are, actually.

"Um." Not Lena slowly rolls off the bed, backing into the corner. "Kara? What the fuck?"

She finally jerks into motion, clenching her jaw and her fists at once.

"Lena." Kara's voice is rarely this low, rarely this dangerous, and Lena snaps to it. Both of them do. "We're closing those breaches. Now."

She doesn't even take time to explain everything to this Not Lena — the _last_ Not Lena, she realizes giddily. Instead, Kara just muscles them both out the door, into the lab, hustling the Not Lena through the breach with a wave and an apology and a beignet.

"Well that was—"

"Close them, Lena."

She doesn't know it yet, but the almost-silence that fills her lab in the following moments is going to become her favorite sound in the coming weeks, months, years. Kara finds a spare scrap of counter space to vault herself onto, because God knows she can't just sit in a chair like a normal person, and she quietly eats nine beignets in the time it takes for Lena to program the new solution into her machine. She doesn't ask questions, knowing that Lena needs the quiet to concentrate. But every time she cranes her neck or tips her head specifically quickly, Lena quietly explains what she's doing, why she's choosing one method over another. She's not sure how much Kara actually grasps, but the quiet, appreciative hum each explanation earns from the back of Kara's throat makes it worth it.

"Done."

Lena sidles over from the machine, grabbing the last beignet from the crumpled bag and leaning on the counter next to Kara. She smiles softly up at her, fully aware of the self control it took for Kara to leave the last for her.

"That was easy." Kara tips her chin down a little. "Too easy."

"It wasn't that hard to fix."

There's powdered sugar on Lena's lips, a tiny smudge on her nose.

"And you hid this for how long?" Lena's fingers brush over her knee, picking lightly at the material of her pants. "I mean, seriously, Lena."

"Too long."

Lena's eyes are a little too earnest, and Kara doesn't want to dip them too heavily, not today, so she dips her head instead, kisses the powdered sugar off her nose, her mouth, until Lena is laughing into it.

"You taste good." Kara's tongue slips out, runs along her bottom lip, and Lena gasps slightly. "You should eat these more often."

"I could find some creative uses for powdered sugar."

"Don't tempt me."

The almost-silence settles again, this time broken only by the breathy little noises that Lena is pulling from Kara on the counter as she settles between her knees.

"You know, I could always open another breach if you wanted to try this morning over-"

"Absolutely not."

"I'm just saying-"

"Stop saying."

Kara can't kiss Lena through her smile, it's too wild, too strong to control, and Lena feels that so she settles on pressing kisses to her forehead, her cheeks, her nose.

"Fly me home, Supergirl."

They do open the breaches again, eventually. First, it's just for a mission. Then, Kara has the idea to visit, and it's only been three months but Lena has already established that she's terrible at saying no to her. Like, terrible. That kicked puppy look never loses its firepower.

So they visit. Lena isn't one for a vacation, but it's easy enough to tease away Lena with the offer of traveling to another universe, always using the excuse of gathering information about the multiverse. 

They visit their children, a handful of iterations of tiny models of them both, blonde with green eyes, raven hair with blue. Kara always brings food, the kind of sticky sweet things that children always gobble down. Lena always brings toys — okay, she brings what _she_ calls toys, which is mainly just low-level technology for the kids to play with, but it's educational, right? They don't actually meet the kids — everyone, them and Not Them, agree that's best — but it's enough for them both to watch, to drop in and see what life looks like, a life that's different but always as happy as the one their carving out now, together.

Kara drops in to help at times, too. The device that Lena had originally tried to design before all of this actually _works_ now, so sending messages between the breached universes is easy enough. And although they use it rarely, when the message does come, Kara is quick to breach off world.

"Do you really have to go?" Alex asks once, her concern evident on her face.

"Two Kryptonians are always better than one." Kara grins, and Lena just shrugs as Alex glares at her.

"This is your fault." 

"Worth it."

Kara kisses Lena on the cheek, then steps backwards into the breach. She returns an hour later, a little ruffled but none the worse for the wear.

"That Earth is _easy_."

Neither of them really talk about the one Earth that Kara always goes to alone. It's never for long, a few minutes here, a few there. Sometimes Lena isn't even aware that Kara has gone, doesn't notice until she sees the heavy set of her shoulders, the worry that caverns out silences between the two of them, teeth gnawing absently at her lip.

"Did you go see her today?"

"Yeah."

"How's she doing?"

Kara never answers, just buries herself in Lena's side, her face pressed so tightly into her chest, so tight that she would be worried of hurting her if it weren't for those Kryptonian genes. She never tells Kara that she hasn't stopped being afraid, not since the first day, not since the first time she felt that thrum in her chest when their eyes met. She just holds her, lets her go, hopes she never needs that kind of comfort.

Lena knows that Earth-52 is Kara's favorite the moment that they enter it. She looks over to see Kara smiling softly at her hands, clenching and relaxing them with a look of awe.

"What is it?" Kara answers with a hand to her cheek, pressing, _pressing_, and Lena can feel the change in it. Lena mirrors her, touches her face just to test.

Kara feels human, soft, vulnerable. She can't even explain what's different — maybe the hitch in Kara's voice as she feels the subtlety of Lena's nails scratching against the back of her neck, maybe the quiet trust in her eyes that she's never needed to know before.

Before she says a word, Lena knows this will be the hardest world to get Kara to leave.

She does try to play basketball. She's horrible at it, too, at least without powers. Lena sits on a park bench next to her doppelganger, who wears way more denim and flannel than she had ever envisioned herself in, today in ripped black jeans and a dark blue button down open over an old shirt from Kara's university. 

Not Kara is in a cropped hoodie and black joggers, hair pulled up in a ponytail but no glasses in sight, grinning as her Kara attempts fadeaway jumper after fadeaway jumper.

"Brick." The ball clangs off the rim again. "Brick." Clang. "Brick."

"Okay." Kara whirls on herself, hands in the air. "We get it. You're the coach. Tell me what to fix."

"Maybe stop trying that step back and actually shoot the damn ball."

Another clang.

"Brick."

Eventually, Lena draws her back to their Earth in the easiest way possible — they go out for Chinese food, and Kara orders four entrees, but she hits a wall halfway through her black pepper chicken, half of a crab rangoon dangling from her hand as she glares down at the food, her other hand on her stomach.

"Is this what people mean when they say they're stuffed?" She winces, and the other three laugh, studying her as she doubles over. "Oh my god, I think I might be sick."

That world might be perfect, but Kara refuses to exist in any world where her stomach isn't bottomless, and Lena is grateful when they return and she sees Kara's eyes glow at her, full of warmth.

Later, when she thinks Kara is asleep next to her, she hears a question, quiet and high-pitched, more breathy than normal for Kara.

"Would you love me any less without my powers?"

Lena tugs on her until she rolls over, until their eyes are hardly separated, noses brushing. She sees the worry filling Kara's eyes, the crinkle between them, and this time she can kiss it away, pressing again and again with her lips until that concern relaxes away.

"After all of this, are you really worried about that?"

Kara comes as close to flushing as she can, which wasn't Lena's intention, so she kisses her again, harder.

"I love every version of you, in every universe, whether you like it or not." Her mouth brushes Kara's jaw and she can feel it shift with a smile. "Powers or not, blonde or brunette, whether we have four kids or you haven't gotten the guts up to kiss me yet. Always."

She hums in the back of her throat at that, hands slipping around Lena's waist, and before she can register what's even happening, Kara has them flipped, pulling Lena on top of her.

"Always." Kara's smile is so sweet, so sweet that Lena can't help but jerk up, head tipping back with a gasp, when a finger slips low and sends a jolt up her spine. "Let me show you."

(She does visit for more basketball lessons, and eventually learns she's more of a power forward, with a nasty little skyhook that catches even Not Kara off guard.)

Alex is the one to shoot down the idea of inviting all 38 of them to their wedding. Outside of the fact that it would be confusing, like an absolute _mess_ of confusion, as maid of honor she simply puts her foot down at the added expense and logistic of bringing 38 sets of doppelgangers to this Earth for what is supposed to be a quiet, intimate wedding.

"But they're us." Kara isn't quite whining, but she does whip out that look, the one that makes Lena bend over backwards immediately. "I feel like they deserve it."

Apparently, after a few decades as sisters, that expression does nothing to Alex, who simply folds her arms.

"The answer is no." Kara opens her mouth, but she lifts one hand. "We'll send them a copy of the video. That's final."

(It ends up being for the best. The wedding is interrupted, almost as if on schedule, by a T-Rex. A literal, actual, full-sized T-Rex. Kara's eyes flash with surprise, then annoyance, when both Barry and Oliver's dress suits transition into their supersuits in under five seconds flat.

"What?" Oliver's eyes dance with amusement, flicking his wrist to expand one of his stealth bows. "It's a tradition, right?"

Sara whips a pair of lightweight 20mm grenade launchers from under a pew with an absolutely murderous gleam in her eyes, tossing one to Alex, who grins at her gratefully.

"We need to plan a wedding every year.")

There's so much for Lena to learn.

That's all she can think in the months, the years that follow. Lena has never let herself crack open entirely for another person, and now all she wants to do is memorize every single inch of Kara's being, learn every aspect of her inside and out.

She wants to learn her language. She's not sure why she asks the first time, but the look in Kara's eyes when she asks to learn Kryptonian is enough of an explanation. Lena learns a number of reasons after the fact, well after she's become fluent.

She wants to speak Kara's language because it means they can quietly plot during game night without anyone else, even a mind reader like J'onn, being able to disrupt their plans. Because it means that she can mutter her dissent to one of Alex's attack strategies at the DEO and earn a chuckle from Kara across the room, even if it does result in a ferocious glare from the older sister. Because it means that she can listen to Kara describing the view from her childhood bedroom, retelling the bedtime stories that her father used to weave to coax her to sleep when she was young. Because it means she can finally understand the handful of curses she's able to lure out of her if she moves her mouth _just_ just right.

So Lena learns Kryptonian. She also learns every single one of Kara's takeout orders — seriously, how can she be considered a regular at upwards of 20 local restaurants? on a reporter's budget? — and then learns which one will be necessary based on Kara's facial expression when she enters the room every night. She learns that Kara prefers the right side of the bed, and will nudge Lena completely off the bed in her sleep if she claims the wrong side.

Lena learns that she has to budget an extra ten minutes into any commute with Kara on foot, because she _will_ stop to pet every single dog she sees, and that _will_ make them late for curtain on the Broadway show that Kara had been dying to see, and throwing around the name of the Luthor Endowment for the Arts will only work at two theaters and four museums in this city.

She learns that Kara will never leave a room without kissing her goodbye. That Kara only wears this one cream sweater, a little oversized and even softer than the rest of her clothes, when she's anxious or sad. That Kara's infinite kindness can be the most frustrating and also the most endearing part of her person, that sometimes it puts her at risk but most of the time, it makes the world around her better.

She learns the hard way that Kara will never go to bed before Lena, even if that means staying up until 4 a.m. to wait out an overnight of teleconferences with investors in Asia. After the third night of walking into a _very_ caffeinated, _very_ delirious Kara laying on her back watching Netflix, she begins to bring her work home. Somehow, she focuses better with Kara's snores lightly rumbling next to her than she ever has in her office alone.

Kara makes it in even later than Lena one night, groaning as she collapses on the bed, grabbing at one of her boots.

"I don't normally curse other planets but-" her voice falls into a grunt as the boot gets stuck on her heel "-I swear to Rao that one needs-" she tugs hard, harder, finally launching the boot across the room "-some universal anger management courses or something."

She beams up at Lena from the bed, smile sleepy as Lena pads over in nothing but an old MIT sweatshirt.

"C'mere." It's slurred all into one word, and Lena happily obliges, flicking the switch over their bed to bathe the entire room in red light. "No, Lena, please I'm so tired-"

"I know." Lena nudges at her, reveling in the way her body has already gone slack and relaxed in its humanity. "Roll over."

Kara stays on her back, eyes shut, but Lena nudges her ribs again.

"Come on."

Kara rolls onto her stomach, letting out a little _whumph_ of air, and Lena swings a leg over her back. She's greeted with a noise of complaint, hears a faint groan of "tired", but then Lena's thumbs dig into the muscle tucked just beneath her shoulder blade, and that groan stretches, deepens.

"Oh Rao." Lena presses firmly, moves her thumbs lower, finds knot after knot and slowly releases the tension. "That's the best thing you've ever done to me."

"The best?" She dips her mouth close to Kara's ear, and there's a faint shudder, even as Kara slips closer and closer to sleep. There's a little laugh, a shake of her head. "That's what I thought."

Eventually, when Kara is almost catatonic, Lena eases off of her, flicking the switch off, settling onto her side. Kara begins to roll over, arms reaching, but Lena nudges her the other way, folding herself over Kara's back and wrapping her arms around her waist.

"I can do some of the saving sometimes, too." 

She whispers it as Kara's breathing slows, as her chest flutters gently. She thinks Kara is asleep, already lost to her exhaustion, before she hears the mumble.

"You always save me." Kara's grip on her hand tightens, slides up to her wrist, thumb brushing over her wedding band. "Every time."

It's more than any I love you, more than any vow could say. And it's enough. It will always be enough.


End file.
